Tuesday, May 15, 2012

In arguing that logography plays a central role in the history of writing, in general and in East Asia in particular, Realms opposes what I see as an over-emphasis on phonography by a number of scholars and theorists of writing, most prominently John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger. Our contrasting approaches will be apparent to anyone who compares our work, but I should have provided more detail about their limited acknowledgement of logography. I do not believe that it is inaccurate to say that they claim that "all writing is necessarily phonographic" (p. 41) or that they insist "on the inherently phonographic nature of all writing" (p. 363), but they do not see all writing as exclusively phonographic. I should have mentioned that, in writings by Unger, by DeFrancis in the 1990s, and in co-authored essays, they repeatedly concede that actual historical writing systems do incorporate some degree of logography. We differ profoundly on the extent and significance of that incorporation, but it is not fair to imply that they deny its existence outright.

In what I really hope turns out to be the worst error in Realms, I recently found to my horror that in preparing the index I missed the fact that the Man'yoshu poem number section is ordered by the page numbers of the references, which of course makes it completely useless. Click here for a link to a properly ordered index (pdf format) to replace the entry on pages 487-488.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Bits and pieces of my 2001 PhD. dissertation are incorporated into the book, and in the few places where the dissertation contains a more detailed discussion there is a note to that effect, but the overall project has changed and expanded so much over the past ten years that I consider the dissertation to have been superseded in almost every respect. However, the two appendices contain concentrated information that is not available in the book, so I am making them available (unrevised) as supplements here.

About Me

This blog contains supplementary images, bibliographic information, and errata for my 2011 book. It is my own private undertaking and has no affiliation with the Harvard University Asia Center or with Columbia University. No profits are made from this site and all images are provided for educational purposes only.